A dumped lover hired his cousin to kill his teenage ex and then tried to cover it up as a botched Bronx robbery – even screaming after his bumbling relative, “You gotta shoot me,” too, when he forgot, cops said yesterday.

Carlos Cruz and killer cousin Devon Miller appeared to be within a hair of getting away with their fiendish plot – until Miller’s dreadlocks did them in, sources said.

A woman looking out her apartment window just after the Sunday shooting saw Cruz chasing a man down the street and told cops the thug turned around and fired at his pursuer. She described the shooter as a hulking man with dreadlocks.

When Miller later showed up at Jacobi Hospital supposedly to console Cruz as he recovered from a minor gunshot wound to the thigh, an eagle-eyed detective recognized him from the description.

That set an investigation into motion that ended with Cruz confessing, sources said.